Anyone who is even lightly active in manga scanlations has heard of #Lurk, its that huge IRC room with all the bots for downloading scanlated manga. For many of us they’re a god sent, since they actively search for manga and add it to their bots as soon as possible.
What do Lurk do exactly? They host the largest IRC manga archive, if its been scanlated you can pretty much find it there. And if its not there they’ll try and find it. They don’t change the releases or anything, leaving all the credits in place. All they’re doing is bringing manga into an easy place to find.
Unfortunately, this seems to have ruffled the feathers of a relatively new group on the scene. NCIS (Nodame Cantible Illegal Scans). They’re in the midst of demanding that Lurk remove their releases and abide by the week ‘grace’ period that’s listed on the NCIS website. The idea being that if you want a release you have to go to NCIS for it.
Personally I’ve always been against such restrictions. Scanlation groups seem to be getting a big head these days. The works they release are illegal, yet they feel they have a right to demand when and where their releases can be downloaded from. A lot of the time, these sites have ridiculous rules, such as xnumber of posts before you can see releases. They claim its to build a community, however i disagree, anything built by the barrel of a shot gun isn’t going to last.
If i find a release i like, then I’ll go the website of the group that made it, but i wont be bullied into joining a forum or chat room just to be able to read a release. I have a few forums I’m active on and those are enough for me, where do these groups (like NCIS) get off trying to tell me i have to join their forum to read their ILLEGAL releases. Hell they even know their releases are illegal and take pride in having it as their name.
I’ve heard that age old ‘we deserve respect for doing what we do’ crap as well. Respect is earned, forcing people to join a forum they don’t want to, and forcing them to make posts (most of which are usually qualifies as spam anyway) isn’t a good way to earn respect. In fact its the quickest way to lose it.
NCIS is currently trying to recruit other groups into boycotting #Lurk, best of look to them, it’ll never work, but they’re welcome to try. Lurk has been established for to long, and has to many supports especially among other groups. Some of which now use Lurk as their official release place. Groups that have a ‘grace’ period for releases always find their releases on Lurk within a few hours to a day. The internet is not a medium you can control. as soon as a release is made its just a matter of time before it gets to lurk. Whether you release through a forum, DDL, XDCC or torrent, the result will be the same.
meh, NCIS need to pull their head out of their arse and just do their releases. Who cares whether someone downloads it from their website or from Lurk. If they’re interested in the group they’ll find the website themselves through the credits. Stop trying to force people to your site guys, its not cool, and wont earn you any respect.
Edit: After reading Josh’s comment and thinking for a few minutes i agree with him. The person who got all het up over Lurk was Edward1087 (probably the same Edward posting here). The reason i didnt name him right away was because the edited logs were released in a Nodame Cantible chapter (Vol 12 chap66) which gives it the appearance of being a full group behind it. 1 person can (and has) destroy the image of an okay group. I don’t like grace periods, nor do i like forcing people to join forums to get releases. Releases should be good enough to stand on their own and attract a community. NCIS is currently doing 2 projects i love, Nodame Cantible and Addicted to Curry, their work is almost on par with the now deceased Yanime. All being told i wouldn’t of bothered with using them as the example in this post, and left it a generic one. However the chat logs posted by Edward in that release rubbed me the wrong way, so i used them.
To edward, get your head out of your arse. To the rest of the staff at NCIS, i appologise you got tarred because of one idiot staff member. In future you might want to double check before releasing 
Edit2: As its been requested, I’ve decided to close the comments on this and the other topic.
September 9, 2007 @ 12:54.
I really don’t see the problem with having a group’s releases hosted on #lurk: they don’t alter the archives or credits, and don’t make money out of it. In fact, it helps distributing the files more quickly and to more people.
So where’s the problem? Aren’t scanlators doing it “for fans”, and not just for download counts, or growing their e-penis? Plus, making so much fuss for something that in the end is illegal and not their work is just stupid.
And finally, they should rather target websites who offer fan work like scanlations and charge money for it (NarutoFan, anyone?), like most of the groups are doing right now.